We live in an age, we are often told, where our ability to picture is limited only by our imagination. Today, that notion is more likely to refer to artificial intelligence systems that generate visual material from text prompts, like DALL-E and the many others that have sprung up in its wake. But as technologically impressive as they are, they also show that our imagination has its limits and can only give form to what we can put into words. To be truly inspired again, we need to venture further into the visual worlds of other times and places, which we can easily do on a website like Public.work.
Jason Kottke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that offers 100,000 copyright-free images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast, has a relatively simple interface, and uses AI to automatically categorize and suggest potentially related images (both visually and in terms of content). And it’s fun to just visually click through related images.”
On these trips, you can go from the covers of old magazines to foreign children’s books, from lifelike landscapes of other countries to detailed world maps, from Japanese woodcuts to American roadside motifs – at least that’s my experience.
“The downside,” Kottke adds, “is that the attribution isn’t that great—especially compared to something like Flickr Commons.” According to librarian Jessamyn West, Public.work isn’t really a search engine, but an interface for a site called Cosmos, which describes itself as “a Pinterest alternative for creatives” and aims to create “a more mindful internet.”
To learn the full story behind the images you find there, you’ll need to do a little research, or at least find the results of research elsewhere on the internet. What you do with it, of course, depends on your own creative instincts. Type Public.work here.
about Kottke
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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall writes and sendsts about cities, language and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books about cities and the book The Stateless City: A Walk Through 21st Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmAshould or on Facebook.
